Four People in a Race

Logic
Logic puzzles require you to think. You will have to be logical in your reasoning.

John, Paul, George, and Ringo all enter a race, but there is nobody at the finish line to judge the ending. When the judge finally shows up to award the prize for coming in first, these are the statements the four of them make:

John: I was neither first nor last.
Paul: I did not finish last.
George: I won the race!
Ringo: I came in last.

The judge starts to hand George the prize, when Yoko, who was watching the race, says, "Exactly one of these four is lying."

To whom should the judge grant the prize?

Answer

The prize should go to Paul.

If John is lying, then George and Ringo would be telling the truth, which would mean John was not lying, so he can't be the liar.

If Paul was lying, then Ringo would also be lying, so he must be telling the truth, as well.

So we now know that neither John nor Paul finished last. If Ringo was lying, then George would have finished last, which would mean that he was lying, as well. So Ringo can't be lying.

This leaves George as our liar, so we know George did not finish first. Neither did Ringo (he finished last), nor did John (he finished neither first nor last). Therefore, Paul won the race!

my gosh - Baffled, you are completely insane!! I'd suggest you not sepnd the one hour a week the nut house allocates you for the interent to read brain teasers!!!
That was completely unnecessary and crazy - angry, angry little man.

Baffle - please direct me to a brainteaser you have posted that is so brilliant?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I wish we had spell check on this website. I can understand complaining about a rude comment (which i have not read), but don't say somebody is stupid if you can't even spell the word ("stupidty" is not a word).

I'm stoopid i'm stoopid i'm stoopid i'm stoopid i'm stoopid. This was a fun one...even thought I went at it completely the wrong way! Ooooooops. I tried to figure it out from the whole grid angle...which (DUH) obviously doesn't work if someone was lying! Good one. Oh, and who is this "baffled" jerk anyway? The word is "S-T-U-P-I-D-I-T-Y". (Yes, my misspelling was intentional...gives more weight to my confession of "stoopiditee"

Nice teaser but i assumed that only the ones that were alive were racing even though it said all four so i only kept Ringo and Paul. then it said Ringo finished in last place so i took his word for it and guessed Paul and i was right. Great teaser man

I'm glad they cleaned up the comments, based on what some people said.

Not everyone is good at logic and you need to have an easy one once in a while so they can get it. There are other sites if you want only very difficult puzzles. I consider this site to be for the general public.

someone mentioned "what if yoko was lying"? the brain teaser question was phrased as a 'problem', so the answer would have to be obtained 'logically or mathmatically'. if the question was phrased 'philosophically' or 'rhetorically', then yoko may have been in the equation.or maybe someone was just trying to get a laugh like I would!

for some reason I really like this type of teaser. They take some time and I usually need to write things down in order to answer them. For this reason I need to give this a moderate level instead of easy.

Don't know if anyone else took a easier and lucky (IMO) route to finding who's lying.
This method is does not rely entirely on logic, but rather intuition. As soon as George says that he won and was about to receive the award, Yoko says that one of them is lying. So I just started from the assumption that George was lying and... bingo ;P.

I did as GreatSlayfer did. Assumed that George had to be the liar (based on Yoko's statement that one person was lying and the reasoning that the other three would have no reason to lie (if you're going to lie why claim to have done worse than you did).
The rest fell into place after that.
It is always fufunny to see people reacting to previous comments on a comment that has been removed.
Though I do wonder who this Baffled guy was. Since his comments seem to get removed with some frequency, he must have been over the top abusive as many "not so nice" comments are allowed to stay.